Practicing Between Categories: A Hermeneutics of Ritual-like New Music

Abstract

Ritualised music theatre emerged from the music theatre developments of the 1960s. According to the musicologist Anthony Sheppard (2001), within ritualised music theatre, composers draw upon materials derived from specific “cultural, ritual or religious sources” and adapt them compositionally within dramaturgical narratives. The proposed paper will problematise Sheppard’s stylistic definition, which lacks a theoretical justification as to why and how composers of this style ritualise their compositions — and, from this, examine two works that exist beyond Sheppard’s characterisation, within the liminal, in-between stylistic space that emerged from American, and European experimental art music. Pauline Oliveros' Sonic Meditations (1971), and Julian Day’s Super Critical Mass Project (2007-ongoing) are two related works of this nature. Both sit in the intersection of theatre, new music, and performance art, and rely on text-scores, instead of traditional notation. Moreover, rather than the compositions Sheppard examines in Revealing Masks, these works bear a closer aesthetic semblance to ritualised experimental theatre forms (such as Jerzy Grotowski’s “poor theater”) and post-1960s ritualised performance art. This disparity is amplified because Sheppard’s characterisation applies to a particular form of larger-scale, aesthetically ambitious music theatre. This is why it is crucial to address this gap and develop a lexicon to better understand both works. Through an inductive, multidisciplinary, hermeneutic methodology, and by drawing upon key performance studies (Richard Schechner, Victor Turner) and ritual studies (Catherine Bell, Ronald Grimes) theories of ritualisation, this essay will plausibly demonstrate why the two works are ritual-like, by contributing to an expanded understanding of the ritualised music theatre paradigm.